Cashbox (Free - Open Source)
“Cashbox was designed from day one to be a quick and simple to use application for managing personal finances. As it has evolved, it has become more feature packed while keeping with the original goal of simplicity.”

iBank (Free Trial / $39.99)
“iBank2 is an intuitive full-featured personal and small business financial manager. iBank 2 is designed to manage bank accounts, credit cards and investments, analyze income and expenses with live updating charts, and plan your financial future with budgeting and forecasting. Wrapped in a beautiful Aqua interface, iBank 2 is a robust financial application able to meet the needs of casual spenders and online day-traders alike.”

Moneydance (Free Trial / $29.99)
“Whether you want to organize your finances, manage your budget, track your portfolio, or just automatically balance your checkbook, Moneydance is the solution for you.

Moneydance’s simple, intuitive interface makes taking care of your finances a breeze. Save time and money with online banking and bill payment. Moneydance makes it easy to set and trace budgets, and reminds you of upcoming bills to keep you up-to-date.”

Ledger (Free - Open Source)
“Ledger is an accounting tool with the moxie to exist. It provides no bells or whistles, and returns the user to the days before user interfaces were even a twinkling in their father’s CRT. What it does offer is a double-entry accounting ledger with all the flexibility and muscle of its modern day cousins, without any of the fat. Think of it as the Bran Muffin of accounting tools.”

Checkbook (Free Trial / $14.99)
“Keeping tabs on your finances is a lot of work. Maybe you’ve tried using a paper check register, but it can’t keep up. Maybe you’ve invested a lot of time and energy in Quicken®, but you’re tired of the clutter and advertisements. Why endure these medieval torture devices? Introducing CheckBook, the quicker, more intuitive personal finance manager.”

Cha-Ching (Free Trial / $14.95 Beta Pricing)
“Cha-Ching is a fun and easy to use money manager, done Mac OS X style. A tag based database lets you organize and search for your incoming and outgoing transactions your way. With Cha-Ching, you can also organize pending transactions, so you can keep track of the the cash you owe the electric company as well as the cash others might owe you–and with iCal integration, you’ll never forget a payment. Cha-Ching also offers fun little doodads you may have not expected–you can keep a photo inventory of your purchased items for insurance and tax purposes, or just for fun.”

Five Millionaires Tell How They Did It - Feel good success stories, all with a common theme: goal setting.

3 Ways to Save on Taxes in 2007 - Geared more to the small business owner, but some good advice that tends to get overlooked.

Consumerism Commentary is giving away a copy of The Maui Millionaires (@Amazon) - Just leave a comment answering “Who you would pay $30,000 to meet?”

Want to Get Rich? Get in Shape - Healthy people are more productive, the cost of unhealthy habits, and focus on the long term.

From the show, Robert’s equations for a quick glance into your financial health are:
1. If your outgoing monthly debt payments are more than 1/3 of your monthly pre-tax income, you have a debt problem.
2. As a percentage, you should be saving 1/2 of your age. For example, a 36 year old should be saving 18% of his/her income.

Also featured was Dave Ramsey, author of The Total Money Makeover, which I’ve featured previously in Becoming Debt Free.

Yahoo Offers Personal Finance Site. The site is geared away from their core investment-focused offerings of finance.yahoo.com and looks to expand their reach through nine content categories: Banking & Budgeting, Career & Work, College & Education, Family & Home, Insurance, Loans, Real Estate, Retirement and Taxes.

Reminder: Americans Drowning in Debt tonight on 20/20, 10:00 pm Eastern, 9:00 Central on ABC.

Related:
Debt in America
Simple Ways to Start Saving
The single greatest obstacle to building wealth

Free Retirement Checkup - Information for getting a free checkup on your retirement planning from Kiplinger Personal Finance and the National Association of Personal Finance Advisors.

Generation X Finance - Helping a unique generation achieve financial independence.

I’m supposed to receive an advance transcript, but I’d recommend watching or setting your DVR to record.

How much can you save per day? Follow the links below to see a month-by-month detail of how your savings grows over the year.

$1 a Day - The George Washington Plan
$2 a Day - Thomas Jefferson Plan
$5 a Day - The Abraham Lincoln Plan
$10 a Day - The Alexander Hamilton Plan
$20 a Day - The Andrew Jackson Plan

Pick a plan and do it!

1. Not Participating
Get started today or as soon as you are eligible by contacting your benefits department.

2. Not Contributing Enough
As a rule of thumb, you should be contributing at least as much as your employer is offering a match.

3. Not Investing for Growth
For the most part, decent advice. However there should be some diversity in your investments. Plan administrators love tout the benefits of aggressive growth but often times the limited offerings within the plan make this a bad idea*. Look at the histories of funds available and make that part of your decision making.

4. Borrowing from your 401k
Again, plan administrators love to tout the ‘borrow against your 401k’ as part of their pitch because you are essentially paying yourself back with interest. Forget it. If you were to leave the company before the loan is repaid, the balance is due immediately otherwise you must delare it as a withdrawl and pay the taxes and penalties on the outstanding amount.

5. Cashing out your 401k
10% early withdrawl penalty and upwards of 40% in taxation depending on your tax bracket. Or better yet, look at it this way: if you were to cash out your 401k early, you can essentially kiss half of it goodbye.

*case in point, I was recently involved in the overhauling of a large company’s 401k program. The 3 aggressive growth funds they offered were dogs with poor return histories - even through the dotcom boom era - and lost more than their peers post-bubble burst. In addition, none have them have kept pace with the modest returns most aggressive growth funds have seen in the last 2 years. In the same plan, one conservative fund has seen 9% annual returns for the past 3 years.

My biggest tip: Open a Savings Account. No matter what you think, unless you have a place to put your money that is out-of-site and out-of-mind, you’ll always find an excuse to dip into it. I really love the online accounts that are readily available these days, whether it be ING Direct, Emigrant Direct, or any of traditional banks who are now offering online accounts outside of their traditional market. Best of all, the online accounts typically have a 2-3 day lag time between your electronic transactions - which is usually enough to stave off any impulse temptation to withdraw funds.

Assuming you’ve got a place to stash your savings, here are some simple tips to start putting some money away.

1. Schedule a recurring deposit from your checking account to your savings account timed a couple days after each paycheck. Start small if you need to, but the key is saving that money when you get it rather than waiting to see what’s left over. Assuming you are paid twice a month, $25 per paycheck is $600/year.

2. Give up one of your vices once a week. Everyone has something they do regularly that they could easily give up once a week. One of mine is dining out for lunches during the work week at average of $6 per day. To make this work, the day you skip your vice, immediate push a deposit to your savings account for the money you would have spent. Smokers, skip a pack a week. I won’t lecture you on what you are already throwing away, as I was one, but I know there are plenty of smokes in a given week you waste. Pick a day to skip a pack and budget your smokes in advance to get you through. Social drinkers - especially my college readers - same thing, skip a night at the bar.

3. Getting a raise at work? For the first six months, automatically deposit the difference between your new check and the old check. You won’t miss your increase given you’ve been living on the smaller amount and after 6 months you’ll have seen enough of the results that I doubt you’ll stop.

4. If you have an Debit card and are going shopping, leave it at home and withdraw the cash from your checking that you plan on spending. When using plastic - be it a credit card or debit card - you are more likely to spend more than you intended vs. spending cash. When your shopping is done, deposit what is left of your budgeted cash.

5. Trim the fat. Everyone has a few expenses that aren’t being used that could be trimmed. Things such as premium movie channel packages on their cable bill, unused gym membership, a more expensive call plan on your cell phone than the minutes you are using, etc. Scale them back and deposit what you were spending.

6. If you are still using checks, when your record your payment in your check register, record the actual amount along with the payee on the payee line, but in your running balance, round the amount up to the full dollar. When you balance your check book each month, deposit your ‘change’ in your savings account.

Audience participation time, what tips and tricks do you have for putting away money?

I used to think that outside of the personal behavior, the credit card industry was the biggest culprit to those stuck in a financial rut. The average college student has $2700 in credit card debt the day they graduate (in addition to an average of $17,000 in student loans). But over the course of the last couple of months, I’ve changed my mind and would now put the automobile ahead of the credit card.

I’ve been volunteering my time to help others with budgets and financial planning and recently, over lunch with the dean of my alma mater’s business school, pitched him on the idea of a one-day seminar to give the soon-to-be graduates some real-world financial advice.

Considering this was held on a Saturday, was voluntary, and only mentioned in a business school ‘happenings’ newsletter, I would have been happy to get 10 people to show up. Much to my surprise, there were 29 students who showed up, with one brought her parents along.

While I was jived at the attendance, my informal (and obviously non-scientific) survey results are what surprised me the most.

Of the 29 students:
first, the credit card debt and student loans were in line with the national average - no surprise there.
- 17 had full-time jobs currently or lined up post-graduation.
- 14 mentioned the first thing they plan on doing is buying a new car when they start working post-graduation.
- 19 owed more on their car than they had in credit card debt. Only 4 did not have a car payment.
- 11 had a car 2 years old or newer.
- Of the 17 who had post-graduate jobs already in the bag, 3 owed more (via debt or total due on the balance of a lease) on their car than their pending annual salary.
- 6 had a higher monthly car payment than their monthly rent.
- Of those with student loans, less than 20% were thinking far enough ahead to budget for their repayment plans.
- Only 2 had a monthly budget
- 4 did not have any credit card card debt, 1 as the result of a bankruptcy in September of 2005 (at 22 years old)
- The combined monthly car payment of the 29 students in the room: nearly $6700 - an average of $230 per person ($267 when you drop the 4 who didn’t have a car payment).

Now here is the lesson for you:
If those 29 students each took that $230/month and invested only that much from now (at an average age of 23) until they are 60; at a very conservative annual return of 8% that would result in a nest egg of $600,000 at age 60. At 10%, a cool Million and change, and at a historical market average of 12%, nearly $1.7 million.

Think about that next time you even consider heading in to the car dealership.